The Story of Shelley Lubben, 
Former Porn Star

Articles - Main

by Judith Reisman, PhD

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Chris Hedges, in Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, writes that the “cruelty” of the “new” pornography “takes a toll on the bodies, as well as the emotions, of porn actresses.” But someone is trying to help them:

The Pink Cross booth has a table of anti-porn tracts and is set up in the far corner of the Sands Expos Convention Center in Las Vegas. It is an unlikely participant at the annual Adult Video News (AVN) expo. Pink Cross is a Christian outreach program for women in the porno industry, run by ex-porn star Shelley Lubben.

I first watched Shelley Lubben on YouTube in early 2009. An “ex-porn star,” she has created the Pink Cross (www.thepinkcross.org) as a public charity to reach out to “adult industry workers, offering emotional, financial and transitional support.” In the YouTube segment, filmed before a church audience, Shelley describes her past life and her current work. A tall, stately woman, she treads the boards, moving her hands to emphasize her words, looking directly and earnestly at her listeners.

As a veteran student of pornography and prostitution, I did not expect to learn anything new from watching Shelley Lubben’s public testimony. I was wrong. Shelley’s description of the sexual violence and degradation of modern pornography was a shock, even to me. It made me think that it made perfect sense to hear that she had left her economically rewarding “star” roles to return to a safer life doing “straight” prostitution. The “glamour” of porn is only a mask:

You have to do what they want on the sets. . . . Girls . . . feel like stars. They get attention. . . . They don’t realize the degradation. . . . Raised on porn, [they] don’t even ask if it’s wrong. . . . They get into drugs to numb themselves. They get their [bodies] ripped. . . . They get HPV and herpes, and they turn themselves off emotionally and die.

Shelley says such women totally lose their identity and live on drugs and alcohol. They cannot plan, save their money, or eat properly. The survivors commonly have only sexual diseases and “fake boobs” to show for their lives in porn. She used to be one of them.